Funky Chicken

To create this image, which won the popular vote in the 2008 Nikon Small World contest, 22-year-old Tomás Pais de Azevedo, a graduate student in evolutionary and developmental biology at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, removed an eight-day-old, two-inch-long chicken embryo from its egg and stained it with a dye that binds to cartilage. The process took three days, after which he photographed the embryo through a stereo microscope. The dark-blue areas of the chick indicate where the cartilage will ultimately solidify into bone. read more

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